Wireless communication technologies have seen explosive growth over the past several years. Wireless service providers now offer their customers an array of services, and provide users with unprecedented levels of access to information, resources, and communications. A recent addition to wireless communication services has been the ability to broadcast television and other content to receiver devices. Multimedia forward link only (FLO) broadcast services allow users to view multimedia programming, such as television shows, as well as receive mobile editions of news, entertainment, sports, business, Internet data, data files and other content, using a mobile receiver device configured to receive the mobile broadcast transmissions. Multimedia broadcast services represent significant bandwidth that may be used for delivering a variety of services to receiver devices.
One protocol for delivering broadcast services is File Delivery over Unidirectional Transport (FLUTE), which is defined in Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Request for Comments (RFC) 3926 and RFC 6726. FLUTE may be used for the delivery of large and small files to many hosts, using delivery sessions of several seconds or more. For instance, FLUTE could be used for the delivery of large software updates to many hosts simultaneously. FLUTE could also be used for continuous, but segmented, data such as time-lined text for subtitling—potentially leveraging its layering inheritance from Asynchronous Layered Coding (ALC, as specified in IETF RFC 3450 and IETF RFC 5775) and Layered Coding Transport (LCT, as specified in IETF RFC 3451 and IETF RFC 5651) to scale the richness of the session to the congestion status of the network. FLUTE is also suitable for the basic transport of metadata, for example Session Description Protocol (SDP) files that enable user applications to access multimedia sessions. FLUTE can be used with both multicast and unicast delivery, but its primary application is for unidirectional multicast file delivery.
There has been a recent trend to deliver streams, e.g., video and/or audio streams, over unidirectional multicast systems as a sequence of files. For example, the primary streaming delivery mechanism in the 3GPP MBMS system has evolved over the past couple of years from RTP delivery of streams to delivery using FLUTE of DASH (MPEG Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP, as specified in ISO/IEC 23009-1 and the 3GPP version of DASH specified in TS26.247) formatted streaming content, where typically equal length durations of streaming content are formatted as DASH segment files and then each DASH segment file is delivered as an object using the FLUTE protocol. However, FLUTE was not specifically designed for such streaming applications, and thus has certain limitations in this context.